Amazon S3 offers a range of storage classes designed for different use cases. These include Amazon S3 Standard for general-purpose storage of frequently accessed data, Amazon S3 Standard - Infrequent Access for long-lived, but less frequently accessed data, and Amazon Glacier for long-term archive. Amazon S3 also offers configurable lifecycle policies for managing your data throughout its lifecycle. Once a policy is set, your data will automatically migrate to the most appropriate storage class without any changes to your application.

 

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Amazon S3 Standard offers high durability, availability, and performance object storage for frequently accessed data. Because it delivers low latency and high throughput, Standard is perfect for a wide variety of use cases including cloud applications, dynamic websites, content distribution, mobile and gaming applications, and big data analytics. Lifecycle management offers configurable policies to automatically migrate objects to the most appropriate storage class.

Key Features:

  • Low latency and high throughput performance
  • Designed for durability of 99.999999999% of objects
  • Designed for 99.99% availability over a given year
  • Backed with the Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement for availability.
  • Supports SSL encryption of data in transit and at rest
  • Lifecycle management for automatic migration of objects

Amazon S3 Standard - Infrequent Access (Standard - IA) is an Amazon S3 storage class for data that is accessed less frequently, but requires rapid access when needed. Standard - IA offers the high durability, throughput, and low latency of Amazon S3 Standard, with a low per GB storage price and per GB retrieval fee. This combination of low cost and high performance make Standard - IA ideal for long-term storage, backups, and as a data store for disaster recovery. The Standard - IA storage class is set at the object level and can exist in the same bucket as Standard, allowing you to use lifecycle policies to automatically transition objects between storage classes without any application changes.

Key Features:

  • Same low latency and high throughput performance of Standard
  • Designed for durability of 99.999999999% of objects
  • Designed for 99.9% availability over a given year
  • Backed with the Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement for availability
  • Supports SSL encryption of data in transit and at rest
  • Lifecycle management for automatic migration of objects

Amazon Glacier is a secure, durable, and extremely low-cost storage service for data archiving. You can reliably store any amount of data at costs that are competitive with or cheaper than on-premises solutions. To keep costs low yet suitable for varying retrieval needs, Amazon Glacier provides three options for access to archives, from a few minutes to several hours. Amazon Glacier supports lifecycle policies for automatic migration between storage classes. Please see the Amazon Glacier page for more details.

Key Features:

  • Designed for durability of 99.999999999% of objects
  • Supports SSL encryption of data in transit and at rest
  • Vault Lock feature enforces compliance via a lockable policy
  • Extremely low cost design is ideal for long-term archive
  • Lifecycle management for automatic migration of objects

  Standard
Standard - IA
Amazon Glacier
Designed for Durability
99.999999999% 99.999999999% 99.999999999%
Designed for Availability 99.99%
99.9% N/A
Availability SLA
99.9% 99% N/A
Minimum Object Size N/A 128KB* N/A
Minimum Storage Duration N/A 30 days 90 days
Retrieval Fee N/A per GB retrieved per GB retrieved**
First Byte Latency milliseconds milliseconds select minutes or hours***
Storage Class
object level object level object level
Lifecycle Transitions yes yes yes

* Standard - IA has a minimum object size of 128KB. Smaller objects will be charged for 128KB of storage. 

** Amazon Glacier allows you to select from multiple retrieval tiers based upon your needs. Learn more.

Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS) is an Amazon S3 storage option that enables customers to reduce their costs by storing noncritical, reproducible data at lower levels of redundancy than Amazon S3’s standard storage. For information about the Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS) class, please see the S3 Reduced Redundancy detail page.